Intransigent

Reading my paper this morning on the boat, and came across an AP news article with this interesting secondary title: "Despite continued efforts from Senate lawmakers, the embryonic stem cell bill will probably be vetoed by President Bush - again."

Anyone sense a certain sense of sadness of tone here?

And then this quote from Sen. Edward Kennedy is bolded and emphasized, "Policies that should rest on science are decided instead by crass political calculations of what is needed to appease the most intransigent elements of the Republican base." Yes, of course there is no crass political calculation to appease the intransigent democratic base...rather Mr. Kennedy is simply appeasing science.

Kennedy's comment prompts me to blog...issues of ethics, morality, and science are close to me. I really do not care about the politics here, but what DOES concern me is the further push toward the scientific method being able to discern ethics and morality. Public policies concerning what experiments we should do with human babies (however immature) seems to me NOT to be something to "rest on science."

Science is a tool and nothing else. It can heal cancer and it can unleash nuclear bombs. Science had darn well NOT determine public policy, hopefully we all realize that.

I'll admit I had to look up the word intransigent - but using those fancy words doesn't make me feel like Kennedy is smarter than me - heck he thinks that just because the word is found inside conscience that science has one. Intransigent means refusing to agree or compromise; uncompromising; inflexible, and so when it comes to destroying human embryos in order to harvest them for all manner of experiments, call me intrasigent.

Comments

Anonymous said…
The fact that some people keep pushing this same bill despite the veto makes them every bit as intransigent as us.

I read a book a while back that pointed out an argument I'd never really paid attention to before: This isn't a religious issue. It's a science issue. In science it's well-known, to the point of being common sense, that when egg and sperm combine, a new human being is created.

It's only in _law_, curiously enough, that we decide that egg-plus-sperm isn't really a human being. In science there's no question: Of course it is.

Which should cause us to consider that this isn't the first time our country has declared that someone biologically human is legally not.
6:54 PM
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